


When Time Unfolds

by LinSetsu



Category: D.Gray-man
Genre: Drabble, Gen, Oneshot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-14
Updated: 2018-02-14
Packaged: 2019-03-18 08:56:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 941
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13678443
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LinSetsu/pseuds/LinSetsu
Summary: In the Ruins of Mater, Kanda waited for his life to fade. Yet something made him get back up and return to the Order. One last time. Oneshot.





	When Time Unfolds

A/N: Written for a prompt some time ago. Spoilers for chapter 207 maybe, though not much. 

* * *

 

 

**When Time Unfolds**

 

This again.

Kanda sighed and turned his eyes to the only other existence inside the vacuum of darkness – a single lotus flower suspended inside an hourglass. He didn’t know how it floated there, or how it radiated a soft, luminescent light, or – for that matter – how he was the only one able to see the damn thing that ticked his life away, one petal at a time.

_Don’t tell anyone you can see them._

He was used to looking through illusions. Used to pretending the world wasn’t littered with these flowers – used to ignoring the apparitions of a faceless woman who drove him to stand back up every time his heart stopped beating.

Some days he could pretend it was all a figment of his imagination. The Black Order, Innocence, Akuma, the Bean Sprout, Bookman, Lavi, Lenalee, Komui – everything and everyone clinging to him like cobwebs. Their invisible threads tickling him ceaselessly, yet so frail they dissolved right between his fingers whenever he tried to hold onto them.

Some days he could swear _this_ was his entire world. This realm of darkness with the lotus in the hourglass, where time was a malleable concept and space nonexistent – where a hundred years could pass within the span of a minute, and a second could stretch across a thousand years. It was here that he had waited between death and awakening, the memories of his previous life sinking deeper and deeper into muddy waters. The same murky depths where lotus flowers grew.  

Not that any of it made any difference to Kanda now. His time was up. The last, pale petal hung listlessly inside the glass, half-wilted and ready to join the others that were now nothing more than withered brown remains lying at the bottom of the encasement.

Was he here to see his own life fade away for good? If so, that wouldn’t be so bad.

He didn’t know how long it had been since Allen had sent them to the ruins in Matera. How long since Alma had stopped talking, stopped breathing. How long since he had watched his only friend – his reincarnated lover, two beings with one soul – walk away hand in hand.

_We love you._

Kanda closed his eyes and leaned back into the darkness, feeling it envelop around him, neither warm nor cold. Everything was still. Silent. Scentless.

Until –

The smell of cigarette smoke tugged at his slow senses and he looked up at a figure standing behind the hourglass.

“You’re supposed to be dead,” Kanda said.

“Who came up with that bullshit?”

“The Order, the Church, everyone. They said it was your blood on the window. Your mask. Your DNA.”

“Yeah? Did they find a body?”

He could hear the grin in the General’s voice, even if he couldn’t see it, and knew better than to ask for an answer that would never come.

“You know what makes life worthwhile?” Cross said. “We all die.”

“If you want to spout philosophy, save it for someone else.” Kanda had no use for it where he was going.

Cross chuckled, a deep-throated sound that was almost comforting to his ears after hours, if not days, of hearing nothing.

“There’s a saying in the East. _Cherish the intransient beauty of nature, all the more for its fleeting life_. Life is only beautiful because we die. Anything that’s immune to the passage of time is damn fucking ugly, be it Akuma, Innocence or the Noahs.”

“Your point?” Kanda asked. Habit brought an edge of impatience to his voice, but he found he didn’t mind the conversation. It was better than spending the rest of his life simply waiting in this void.

Cross tapped the hourglass in response. The dying petal quivered, but did not fall. Yet.

“Your time’s about to start moving again.”

“Whatever’s left of it,” Kanda said. “I won’t live long enough to be useful in the war against the Earl.”

“Maybe, but I have a favor to ask.”

Kanda’s brow rose. “You? A favor?”

“Give my idiot pupil a hand, will you?”

“Do it yourself.”

Cross snorted. “Do I look like I can? Besides, I can’t help him. That’s why I’m asking you.”

“I’m the last person you should ask.”

“No, you’re the first. You know what it’s like to live through two lives in a fucked up sequence of time.”

“What are you saying? The Bean Sprout isn’t one of us.”

“He’s something far worse.”  

Kanda narrowed his eyes and clicked his tongue. He took a step closer to the hourglass, but Cross was still nothing more than a shadow on the other side. The red glow of his cigarette seemed to grow brighter as the lotus dimmed.

He stared at the last petal as it drooped further, his mind already made. “I owe him one anyway.”

“Thanks, Yuu.”

“It’s Kanda,” he murmured, more habit than anything.

The petal fell and drifted and settled beside the others at the bottom of the hourglass. Like a dying firefly, it drew in the darkness around them and not even the cigarette light could keep it at bay. Still, he knew Cross was there, and that he would stay with him for these last few, timeless seconds before everything began to move again. One final time.

“Yuu.”

“What.”

“I lied. You were always one hell of a beauty, even when time meant nothing to you.”

Kanda clicked his tongue again. “Fuck off.”

He heard Cross breath a smile.

“I’ll see you on the other side.”

_It’s not over yet._


End file.
